SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2025

DO HUMAN BEINGS NEED RELIGION?

Nietzsche’s famous quote, ‘God is dead. And we have killed him.’, is far from true if we take it to signify the demise of religion. While this may be the case in pockets of western Europe, although even there God isn’t quite dead but has been moved to intensive care, there are huge swathes of the globe where his health is as robust as ever. There are few disbelievers in Allah in the Islamic world, while the Christian God still holds sway in most of non-Muslim Africa. Catholicism dominates Central and South America. Even in Europe, Christianity remains a major force in Poland, while in much of the United States beyond the coastal fringes, belief in God is ubiquitous and entangled with worldly politics and strong enough to influence elections, so very few politicians who wish to get into power are bold enough to declare themselves agnostic, let alone atheist. Ironically, in a nation which is officially secular, religion holds far more sway than it does in the UK where the monarch is Defender of the Faith.

As for the East, much depends on our definition of religion, for many people would label the key belief systems there – Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism – philosophies rather than religions. Broadly speaking, there is no personal God in these systems, and certainly no monotheistic God. China, for example, is highly syncretist, with many happy to mix and match from the three main belief systems available. There are enclaves of Christianity in the Far East, especially in South Korea, which may eventually result in a religion which demands a rejection of all of the rest, but at the moment Christianity there seems to have become just another alternative which can live alongside the others as is true in much of the East (with the possible exception of the Falun Gong in China, which I don’t know enough about to make a confident statement). Religion is not as exclusive in Asia as it is in the countries dominated by monotheistic faiths, and there is no concept of heresy and no such thing as apostasy. Yet despite the absence of religion from the broader political realm, the power of these belief systems remains very strong at a social level in collectivist societies which stress the central role of the family and respect for the ancestors and the elderly.

So religion is far from a busted flush, but in countries like the UK and France, there are many who question its relevance in a modern world that is dominated by science and who argue it is a relic of the past, a collection of fairy tales that we should discard and leave behind. Ever since the key figures of the Enlightenment, especially those in France, there has been a strand of thought whose rejection of religion is radical and all-encompassing, and this has become a kind of atheist tradition, its latest manifestation being the New Atheists of the 21^st century. Over the same period, however, a reaction against scientific suprematism sprang up and did much to fuel Romanticism, Symbolism, and various mystical movements as a kind of shadow of modern science and a rejection of the empiricism and materialism at its roots.   

In this essay I will look at four broad areas in which it has been argued that humanity cannot thrive without religion: as a moral foundation; as a provider of meaning to life; as a consolation for life’s miseries and a way to overcome the fear of death; and as a social cement to bind societies together.

Can we be good without God? More generally, do we need a moral system that is absolute, in which a supreme being sets the standards, or can we function perfectly well in a world where ethics are manmade and relativistic? This is the key question which is explored in The Brothers Karamazov, where the argument for moral absolutism is often paraphrased as ‘If there is no God, everything is permitted.’ In a world where the limited and mortal human being is paramount, there is arguably nothing left except the will to power, might becomes right, and we descend into Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’ in which life is ‘nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short’ (although Hobbes was more concerned with politics here on earth than in abstract ethics – British mistrust of theory has a long history). Kant rejects the idea that morality is a personal choice and argues for a deontological ethics which is unassailable and non-negotiable and transcends any local differences. Supporters of his ideas point out that there are certain values, such as the interdiction against murder, which occur in all religions and could form the basis for a general deontology.

Opponents counter that this reduces God to a policeman in the sky and the morality that results is only followed through fear of punishment and therefore not genuinely felt. It is a strategy rather than a deeply-held belief, a form of Pascal’s wager, a self-serving and superficial obeisance which is at best a compromise and at worst a form of hypocrisy. And in the real world in which our daily life unfolds, even morality which is nominally based on religious doctrines is relativistic in several ways: different religions hold different values; individuals within the same religion often have competing moral standards; and changes in ethical norms occur within the same religion over time. So the claim that any religion has a permanent set of ethics at its core is highly contestable.

Similarly contestable is the notion that religion is necessary for people to behave with kindness and respect for others. For instance, there is no evidence that the crime rate is lower in countries where there is greater religiosity, which should be the case if religion makes people good. In fact, the opposite seems to be true with lower rates in nations with a higher incidence of atheism, while surveys of the US show less crime in states like Oregon and Vermont than in those of the deep South. To be fair, this is probably the result of a third factor, greater poverty in the areas where religion is strongest, and has nothing to do with faith, but it at least suggests that there is no necessary link between religion and ethical conduct. Meanwhile, at the level of the individual, both the religious and non-religious fought against the evils of Nazism, and both were equally likely to be complicit.

A second argument against the idea that religion encourages better moral behaviour is the fact that it has been responsible throughout history for much that is brutal and inhumane, at least in states ruled by monotheistic faiths: holy wars and crusades, inquisitions, burnings at the stake, trials of witches, forced conversions, and so on. Again, though, there is the counter-argument that this was due at least partly to other, political factors rather than religion alone, as is clear in the conflicts of the Middle East and Northern Ireland, where religion is just one more complicating factor rather than the primal cause. Religion in this view is less a cause of war than a tool which is used by those seeking to ignite conflict, preying on people’s beliefs to foment hatred of religious Others. Add in economic inequalities and struggles over finite resources and it is clear that religion cannot take all of the blame. It can be fairly blamed, though, for the frequent eagerness of organised religion to stir the pot, or to compromise with abhorrent regimes in order to protect its own estate.

Nietzsche’s quote at the beginning of this essay was not announcing the death of religion; he was referring to the turn away from theism to humanism, toppling God as a source of moral guidance, a responsibility which therefore passed on to humanity. Far from seeing many key features of Christian doctrine – humility, obedience, submission, care for the weak and lowly, turning the other cheek – as virtues, he saw its moral system as abominable, advocating mediocrity, hypocrisy, cowardice, and passive aggression. Whether we agree with this or not, it is true that the values of any particular religion need not be seen as desirable by all religions; believers of one faith often reject the ethical systems of others.   

The second benefit of religion that is claimed by believers is that it gives meaning to our lives, unlike a mechanistic science which reduces us to molecules and matter. It is certainly true that human beings have a deep desire to believe that their lives are meaningful and even those who are generally non-religious will often say that they feel they are on this earth for some unknown reason even if they don’t know what this is and even if they don’t believe in God. Biology’s counter to this would be that this need for meaning is a result of our brain’s desire for patterns in order for us to survive in this dangerous world, and ultimately a consequence of natural selection. Religion ends up being explained as a primitive way of trying to understand the world which enabled early humans to overcome a challenging environment and survive and pass on their genes, but that these magical ways of looking are no longer required now that a far superior method – namely science – has taken over the torch.

There is an underlying arrogance here which atheists who valorise science generally deny. They refuse to accept that their own physicalism is also a way of seeing the world which can never be ultimately proven. They say that there is more evidence for their worldview, which may be true, but this worldview includes the premise that evidence is the defining measure of what constitutes reality, so their argument is ultimately circular. Moreover, both religious thinkers and scientists themselves conduct the same search for patterns to explain how the universe is and to enable us to use this understanding to our advantage, but one tends to be introspective and focuses on subjective experience while the other studies nature and the outside world, and sometimes even denies the reality of subjective states of being. One irony of much scientific thinking is that it therefore struggles to explain the sense of curiosity that drives many scientists in their work. Evolutionary psychologists will argue that this curiosity exists because it is beneficial in terms of natural selection, but I am wary of this constant recourse to instrumentalist biology as an explanation for almost everything because it easily becomes a kind of free pass to get them out of tight corners, and Just So stories of life on the savannah ultimately have no more hard, physical evidence than those of sightings of ghosts or the Loch Ness monster.

For laypeople, the concepts of modern physics, such as quantum mechanics or string theory or the multiverse, convey no more meaning than the belief that the universe is a mountain of turtles resting on top of each other. At least the turtles are easy to imagine. Scientists counter that, unlike the turtles, they can validate their theories by the fact that they work in practice, in contrast, say, to the efficacy of prayer, where no similar proof exists. Obviously, I’m totally unqualified to judge these abstruse theories at a scientific level, but in terms of human society it is not desirable that an intellectual elite has access to arcane knowledge which is beyond the comprehension of most people. Ironically, this is similar to how monks who could read and write interpreted the Bible for the masses in the days before widespread literacy, masses who had little choice but to believe what many of us today see as fairy tales. Again the scientists have a counter-argument: we are free to study science and see the truth for ourselves, but time is finite and few of us can afford several years studying physics even if we have the intellectual and mathematical ability to do so.

One last argument that is often made by followers of traditional religion is that its decline has led to a proliferation of nonsensical beliefs in the paranormal. There is a famous quote from G.K.Chesterton: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in everything.’ It certainly feels true that since the weakening of organised religion, there has been a surge in the west of what many would call pseudo-science, ranging from the Spiritualist movement of the late 19^th century as advocated by Conan Doyle, to the New Age movement of reiki, alternative medicine and crystal therapy, to a revived interest in astrology and the Tarot and a raft of unprovable beliefs. This phenomenon again stems from a gap between people’s subjective experience of their daily lives and the world as understood by science. Something within the human spirit seems to feel unsatisfied by the scientific outlook and I will now move on to where science is arguably weakest in comparison with religion: as a consolation for the trials and suffering of life and as a way of facing up to the inevitability of death.

The New Atheists are quite scathing of religion on this point, seeing believers in God as cowards who lack the courage to face up to the bracing truths of science and instead seek refuge in childish fantasies. Fear of death is almost universal, and for once the claims that this is rooted in evolutionary pressure seem impossible to refute. Few of us can achieve the calm of Epicurus: ‘Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ (And we can never know for sure, of course, that he was as stoical in real life as in his words: as a writer, I’m well aware that what we say on paper is not always the same as what we do in reality.)

While there is clearly an instinctive fear of death in the sense that we will react at once to avoid it when it threatens, just as non-human animals will scurry away from danger, I’m not sure that our own death haunts us as much as we believe. For a start, it is impossible to conceive of our non-existence, at least when we are awake and fully conscious: when I try to imagine nothing and not existing, there is still my ego looking on and seeing, for example, a patch of black. Nothing remains something in my mind. And when we examine our fears more carefully, they are often about the painful process of dying as much as about death itself, which lies beyond our possibility to conceive. I suspect, therefore, that fear of the unknown lies at the root of much of our dread: Hamlet’s ‘to sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.’

More generally, religion can be a consolation which helps us to withstand the pain and injustices of life, something with which the New Atheists would likely concur. When we are bottom of the pile on earth, it is comforting to believe that at some point in an afterlife this will no longer be true, and this belief enables us to endure situations where death might otherwise be seen as preferable. Almost everyone knows that Marx described religion as ‘the opium of the people’, but few are familiar with the words that followed: ‘It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions’. This beautiful sentence shows that, far from being a crazed iconoclast railing against religion who wanted to burn bibles, he recognised its value even if, to use an expression with biblical origins, he thought it was a Job’s comforter. Science in comparison offers little except a rather bleak truth which does nothing to calm the soul, and for this reason alone I doubt that we will ever totally discard religion as a powerful force in human life.

Perhaps the greatest pain in life is that of grief. Non-human animals mostly escape this pain, although some species like elephants and dolphins show behaviour which suggests that they engage in what we would call mourning if we saw it occur in human beings. For humans the death of a loved one is rarely fully overcome. We have several ways of trying to deal with this. We often say when someone dies that they have gone to a happier place where they will no longer suffer and it is those who are left behind who suffer most as they struggle to fill the aching hole in their heart. This probably explains why so much of religious thinking about death centres on seeing our loved ones once more – meeting them in paradise in Christianity and Islam, ancestor worship in the various beliefs of Asia, spiritualist churches and seances where contact is made with the dead to prove that they still exist. Religion’s survival of the individual person helps to soften our pain, whereas science’s talk of the immortality of atoms does little to console. Other people can live on in our hearts with support from systems of faith, and in this sense love is stronger than death, even if at first this sounds like a pious wish or desperate sentimentality.

This brings us to the fourth benefit of religion, which I will discuss only briefly because much of it has been rehearsed in the section above: that religion provides a bond which unites people both at a local level and within a larger culture. From listening to my friends who are religious, the social contact at the church or mosque or temple forms a vital part of their lives, as vital in many ways as the inner beliefs of their religion. Also, much of this support is not only emotional, but practical, such as ensuring the safety of the elderly and taking care of the poor and sick. Human beings are a social species, and religion can do much to allay loneliness and isolation in our technologised and atomised modern world.

The problem is that this easily becomes a form of social control which rejects and ostracises minorities of all kinds: ethnic, religious, sexual, philosophical. Every in-group requires an out-group to act as its defining border and it is difficult to find a balance between the cohesion that a strong social group brings and the cruelty towards, and conflict with, Others that can result. I have seen this myself in some Asian countries, where armies of clucking aunties pile pressure on anyone who doesn’t conform, their desire for control disguised as love. On the other hand, groupthink is just as prevalent in more secular settings; in the west, we all pride ourselves on our freedom of thought, but in reality we all tend to think the same and mistrust or even fear those who see the world differently.

In conclusion, although I don’t believe we need religion in order to be good, and it is impossible to deny that many of the most malevolent evildoers wrap themselves in the cloak of religiosity, while dark, often unconscious motives can lurk behind its benign facade, I cannot envision a planet in which religion vanishes. Put simply, it offers comforts that science is incapable of offering. One quote I use a lot because I strongly agree with its core message is Eliot’s ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’. The scientists and philosophers in the New Atheist movement clearly see themselves as bearers of this reality and built of sterner stuff than those who cling to religion or seek refuge in the delusions of the paranormal. Although I might also call myself an atheist, or at least one of Russell’s teapot agnostics, I dislike this supercilious dismissal of most of the human race. Wisdom is more than knowledge, and human beings are more than rational actors bound to logic, and in a happy, healthy world, religion can supply us with hope and consolation. The task of science, perhaps, should not be to denigrate faith but to provide a balance that prevents the repetition of the atrocities that have occurred throughout human history beneath the banner of religion.